Democratic members of the U.S. Senate recently announced “We the People,” a legislative package the New York Times describes as intended to “hit campaign contributions, lobbying laws and other accountability issues.” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton hailed the legislation, which is unlikely to pass under Republican control, as “a strong package of reforms to help restore our democracy and break the grip of wealthy special interests in Washington.”

We applaud any effort to address undue influence and the role of money in politics. (We also think the package of ambitious proposals should have included public financing.) While the provisions in the legislation may prove hard to move even in a Democratic-controlled Senate, we offer 11 ideas to which nearly every senator should be able to say yes.

1) Congress should make it easier to track agents of foreign governments who are trying to influence our politics — by requiring foreign lobbyists who register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to do so electronically instead of filing by filing paper, allowing easy processing and review of their activities.

2) The Senate should make it possible to closely track each lobbyist — by publishing the unique ID number for lobbyists on their lobbying disclosure forms, the LD-2s, to facilitate tracking by individual.

For more, see recommendations of the American Bar Association Lobbying Task Force.

3) Congress can open up how it makes spending decisions — by webcasting video from appropriations hearings, as the House does, and not just audio.

4) Congress should make it easier to hold agencies accountable — by making sure all reports of the agencies that are required by law are available through the Government Publishing Office; and also that all inspector general reports are in one central place.

5) The Senate should open its financial books to the public — by publishing its semi-annual statement of expenditures in an open data format, like a digital spreadsheet, as the House already does. Currently, the Senate publishes its spending as a PDF and the data is available through third parties.

6) The Senate can make it easy to see who donates to senators — by passing the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act. The measure requires Senate candidates to file their campaign disclosure reports with the FEC, not the secretary of the Senate, which would make the information online more quickly and reduce administrative costs by $500,000 annually.

7) Congress should shed light on secret money — by requiring the IRS, which receives the tax returns of nonprofits known as 990s, to receive all the tax returns as data, building on an Obama initiative and a recent IRS decision to release information submitted in digital format.

8) The Senate should make it easier to see how federal money is spent — by publishing all of the administration’s congressional budget justifications in one place. These justifications explain agency spending in plain language that anyone can understand.

9) The Senate should make itself more open to the public — by creating a Senate transparency officer whose job is to help people outside the institution understand where information is, and works with committees and personal offices to be more open and transparent.

10) The Senate can make itself more savvy about technology — by restoring funding to the Office of Technology Assessment, a legislative branch agency that provided nonpartisan technology advice to Congress.

11) The Senate should fix its operations — by convening a special committee on improving the operations of the Senate, looking at issues of capacity to conduct executive branch resources, staff pay and retention, and more, as it has done historically in 1993, 1978 and 1947.

Improve chamberwide coordination on open government including: a transparency ombudsman, an Advisory Committee on Public Access to Information and strengthen oversight of legislative support agencies

How the Senate Should Use Legislative Appropriations to Improve Openness and Accountability (Testimony)

Extend and broaden the Bulk Data Task Force

Publish the Congressional Record in XML and eliminate electronic publication gaps

Publish a complete and auditable archive of bill text, in a structured electronic format

Instantiate a Senate-wide committee record publishing system

Publish a contemporaneous list of widely distributed CRS reports that contains the report name, publication/revision/withdrawal date and report ID number

Release widely distributed CRS reports to the public

Publish the Congressional Bioguide in XML with a change log

Publish the Constitution Annotated in a machine-readable format

Publish Senate office and support agency reports online

Daniel Schuman is the policy director of Demand Progress, a national grassroots group with more than two million members who fight for basic rights and freedoms needed for a modern democracy. He is also a co-founder of the Congressional Data Coalition, a coalition of citizens, public interest groups, trade associations and businesses that champion greater governmental transparency through improved public access to and long-term preservation of congressional information. He has long worked at the intersection of law, policy and technology, including as policy counsel and director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency at the Sunlight Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @danielschuman or email him at daniel@demandprogress.org

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation.